There is a long tradition of Antisemitism in European folklore. To understand it, one must look first to the legend rather than to the folktale or fairy tale, though Antisemitism certainly makes its appearance even here, as folk beliefs permeate every aspect of so-called folk wisdom.
Two main legendary traditions depicted Jews in an extremely negative light: the blood libel legend and the legend of the Wandering Jew, Ahasver. In the first, the belief was promulgated that Jews committed the ritual murder of a Christian, usually a boy, in the week before Easter to collect his blood for religious purposes, usually to be baked in the unleavened bread (matzo) eaten at Passover. The first occurrence of this accusation followed the unsolved murder of a boy named William in Norwich in 1144. In the years following his death, a cult gradually grew around him, and eventually he was canonized as St. William of Norwich. A rash of similar tales spread throughout Europe, first in England but soon also in France, Spain, Germany, and eventually also in Poland and beyond.
The last widely publicized case was in Massena, New York, in 1928. The legend of the Wandering Jew tells that a Jewish man was punished for unkindness to Christ on the way to Calgary by being damned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. It is important to note that a legend is a tale that is or has been believed to be true by at least some people. Because of this, the nature of these two tales is far from harmless. Both depict Jews as cast out by (the Christian) God and worthy of the cruelest punishment, for this tradition ascribes to all Jews, even those living much later, the guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They disseminate stereotypes about Jews that have been extremely difficult to eradicate: that they are malignant, avaricious, and deceitful, that they are little better than vermin, that they are a diseased and somehow “unmanly” race, and that they deserve to be killed. Accusations of blood libel almost always led to loss of property and loss of life: nineteen people were executed in the case of St. or Sir Hugh of Lincoln, in 1255, for example, and the king confiscated the property even of those Jews whom he in the end chose not to kill. Pogroms continued until the twentieth century, incited by the ideas found in these and other similar tales.
Here one can see the great power of folklore by way of a negative example. Belief in blood libel confounded the most reasoned attempts to disprove it. Sometimes a pogrom took place even when there was no body found: an entirely empty accusation was enough to spark a riot. Evidence that not a single blood libel case can be proved, and that the Jewish religion prohibits the ingestion of even animal blood, has not prevented even some recent writers on the topic from asserting there must be a basis in the actions of at least some Jews.
A larger view shows that accusations of this nature have always been made of a minority group that is feared, perhaps because, paradoxically, the ruling culture knows subconsciously that it is oppressing this group. For example, early Christians themselves were accused of similar crimes in Roman times. If the oppressed group can be shown to be guilty of heinous vices, then the oppression can continue as justified. Or, in the case of the Wandering Jew, a folklore motif with a very wide dispersal-the figure of one who wanders the earth until the end of time-is used in a new context to justify and confirm attitudes already held. The Wanderer was once the great Nordic god Odin or Wotan and later became the Wild Huntsman. In later Christian times he becomes the outcast Jew and this “truth” is used to condone the refusal to let Jews settle in European cities. Interestingly, if the blood libel tradition started in Catholic times, the Wandering Jew tale had its heyday in a Protestant context.
In 1602, a concerted effort seems to have been made to propagate this legend quickly with the simultaneous publication of pamphlets throughout Europe. This occurred at a time when Jews were beginning to settle again in Europe after a long period of absence, earlier Jewish communities having been exterminated in the Crusades from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Furthermore, it has been argued that the various waves of anti-Semitic fervor tended to occur in times when the Christian church was unsure of maintaining its power: one group in power can consolidate its position by scapegoating another. The Jews were all too suitable for this role. As Christianity had grown out of Judaic traditions, the Jews could continue to be seen as the enemy, the “Other,” those who were by definition different.
One fairy-tale example of anti-Semitism occurs in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's tale “Der Jude im Dorn” (“The Jew in the Thornbush”). It is telling that the Grimms felt this tale to be suitable even for their Kleine Ausgabe (Small Edition, 1825) for children, despite their efforts otherwise to clean the tales up for a young audience. The misuse of folklore against the Jews culminated in the events in Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, when the Grimms' tales, Germanic mythology, and even proverbs were interpreted by pedagogues and folklorists in ways that underlined and reinforced the racism and anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Of course, anti-Semitism is by no means a solely German phenomenon. Though largely a Christian phenomenon, it has also spread to Islamic cultures. Both legends mentioned here form the subject of countless local legends, saints' legends, chapbooks, and ballads, and anti-Semitism echoed through the “high” literary tradition as well (in Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, for example.) The stereotyped figure of the avaricious Jew occurs in miracle plays and proverbs, and stories abound throughout the ages about Jews who poison wells and desecrate the Host, for example. Examples of relevant motifs can be found in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Motifs V360-V364).
